In honor of the recently deceased Mick Farren, Kate Simon sent me the above shot of two brilliant minds - arguably the two best rock music writers of the 1970's, Farren and Lester Bangs. Thank you, Kate!
Make sure to read the obituary in the Guardian by Farren's fellow former NME-scribe, Charles Shaar Murray: "If you gotta go, go now… or else you got to stay all night. Mick Farren was a lifelong writer in a full spectrum of disciplines and a former political activist who became a living banner for the psychedelic left, but fundamentally he was a performer at heart. Late in life, he reunited his 60s cult band The Deviants and returned to the stage, as much his true home as the writer's chair he occupied for the previous four decades or so. Only weeks away from what would have been his 70th birthday, he died a true performer's death: on the stage of a crowded club on a Saturday night with applause still ringing in his ears. I almost went to that show. I'm glad I didn't, and was spared seeing a friend for more than forty years die before my eyes." Continued here.
And also this one, by Chris Salewicz, from the Independent: "It will no doubt serve as a piece of modern cultural mythology that Mick Farren "died as he would have wanted", collapsing onstage on Saturday night at London's Borderline, playing a gig with a reformed version of his 1960s group the Deviants, a concert that he had been advised not to go ahead with on medical advice. More accurately, performing the show only underlined Farren's personal philosophy of unassailable professionalism and a ceaseless work ethic that led to the publication of 23 novels as well as 11 non-fiction volumes. Backstage at the Borderline he may have been plugged in to an oxygen mask, but audience members would be unaware that he was returning to it between numbers." Continued here.
